


The World Outside His Head

by telm_393



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Alternate Universe - Human, Brothers, Child Abuse, Constructed Reality, Delusions, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Worldbuilding, Wrongful Imprisonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 12:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18549955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Samael grows up into Lucifer. Amenadiel does his best to take care of his little brother.





	1. Samael, Lucifer, and Amenadiel

**Author's Note:**

> I will admit that this is kind of...an idea I never quite finished? But I still wanted to share what I had, since I think there's enough to it to stand alone and I liked doing the worldbuilding to make "Lucifer isn't actually the Devil" at least kind of work.

_First, there is darkness. Then his Father and Mother make him, and he takes flight._

_His name is Samael._

He is born in Dover. His father’s gone, his mother leaves him on the street. When he is found, the doctors are impressed at how healthy he still is. They call him Baby Boy Doe, and send him to an orphanage. He doesn’t remember any of that. His first memory is of being two years old, flying to America on an airplane in 1984 with the people who become his mother and father.

They name him Samael.

_His Father and Mother are God and the Goddess. They created Samael and his siblings, archangels all of them._

Giannis and Lily St. John are well-known businesspeople and philanthropists. They’re old money, but they still work in the real estate business that Mr. St. John’s own great-grandfather built from the ground up years and years ago.

They like children almost as much as they like money, and so they adopt, knowing that God will reward them for their kindness, and they realize soon enough that they need as many children as they can get. They need the most beautiful ones, those with the most potential. They are meant to create people who are greater than human beings, and teach them how to live in a world that’s not good enough for them.

Their little angels.

_He is the youngest of many sons, and only older than his one sister. He lives in the Silver City of Heaven, surrounded by angels and shining things. He studies what he wants to study, throwing himself into what he is drawn to because that is what he’s meant to do. His powers come to him early. He charms his parents, plays with his siblings, annoys his oldest brother but is always with him because Amenadiel is always at his side. Samael takes it for granted. He is happy._

The St. Johns are private people. The location of their home is known to almost nobody, not even their children. It’s a magnificent estate that might as well be a little city, at least to their children. They go away on business often, which is fine. Their children can take care of each other. They teach each child what the child needs to know and no more, and allow their children to learn what they may. To cultivate their talents. They cycle them through art and music teachers and tutors, whatever they want.

Samael is special. He has musical talent, but through glimpses of videos and his own intuition, he learns how to manipulate others like it’s nothing, a master of mind games. He’ll be a good businessman, or maybe a politician. Maybe even a great artist, given his musical talent. Someday these children will change the world, but not yet. For now, they are kept inside. They are kept secret. The outside world will taint them, and they’re still too young to take it over.

_The Silver City is beautiful, it’s perfect, there’s no reason to leave, but Samael becomes restless. He feels he has lived for a very long time, and yet hasn’t lived at all. There is more to existence than what he has. Sometimes he goes out into the human world, even though he is told over and over again that there is nothing there yet, and it’s true._

_But if there’s nothing there yet, shouldn’t they make something?_

The St. Johns did their very best to find the most isolated place possible to build their estate, and settled on a barren stretch of land in Nevada. There’s a couple of small towns nearby, and Samael in particular likes going out to visit them. The St. Johns make sure to stress that he can’t tell anybody about anything, and Samael listens because he likes lying. He refines it after a while, once his father tells him that lying is bad. God doesn’t like it when people lie, he punishes them for it, and so Samael begins to play with lies.

He bends the truth, he omits, he says true things with a smile like he’s joking. Some things he just refuses to say.

He’s tight-lipped about himself. He’d rather play with other people. He likes getting them to tell the truth. He puts his powers to use, perfects them, digs holes in people’s minds and leaves them there.

But then he starts thinking about what it is he’s doing. He’s growing, he’s changing, he’s almost twenty-one years old. The movies that he sneaks in to see tell him that at twenty-one he will be old enough to drink, but he’s never so much as tasted alcohol before, and movies have also told him that people usually drink before they’re even allowed. When they’re in high school.

But Samael never went to high school.

His parents are always talking about when he and his siblings leave, when there will be something for them out there, but Samael’s brief trips out into the world before getting called back home by Amenadiel, they have taught him that there is something out there already.

_His parents are all-powerful, especially Father, but Samael begins to believe that there is perhaps more power in him and the others than he thought. Than Father thinks. He is restless. Pranks, games, refining his powers, they don’t quite do it for him anymore._

_He is growing, he is changing._

_That’s what’s supposed to happen._

_Mother and Father are keeping secrets. Keeping their full powers from them._

_They are never going to let them be free._

_Samael lets his siblings, his fellow angels, know this. Time has already passed, it has gone on and on and yet they are unable to harness their true abilities, ignored by their parents, by Father who is so wrapped up in humanity. That’s not fair._

_They should not have to stay dependent forever in the Silver City. They can take over. Samael insists on this._

_But it turns out that Father is not so merciful as He makes himself out to be, because He finds out what Samael is planning, finds out about the knowledge he has been spreading, the proverbial apple he has given Eve—the book about him that’s written before it all happens, it was a bit literal about the apple thing—and He is furious._

_So is Samael._

Samael tells his siblings that they should leave. He’s bored, aren’t they bored? And they’re adults now, most of them. They should be able to go and do all those great things that their parents promise they’ll do when they’re not distracted by the business or the squabbling Samael’s started to notice. There’s a world out there.

Samael begins to figure it out: they need to get rid of their parents. He doesn’t dream of killing them—Samael has been trained in self-defense, but he doesn’t have much interest in violence, not like Amenadiel does.

What he eventually settles on is this: maybe they should just tell their parents it’s time to let them leave. He thinks he’s swaying the others, though they’ve always been less easily swayed by his mind games than others, probably because they know him so well.

He hasn’t been, though. Uriel is the one to tell his father what Samael’s been talking about, one night at the dinner table, innocent as anything.

Father is furious, even as Samael tries his best to explain that all he wants is to leave, to go and do great things. What’s the point, he asks, of being locked away? Why? This isn’t fair. It’s not right.

That’s when something in him snaps, or maybe it had already snapped and he just hadn’t noticed. He screams.

He tells them he’s out of here, he’s leaving, he’s done. He’s tired of being in this secluded castle like some kind of bloody Rapunzel, and if any of their parents’ stupid, brainwashed children want to come with him, they should.

None of them do. Not even Amenadiel.

They all think it’s just one of the mood swings Samael’s been so prone to lately, but then Samael is gone. Not to town, just gone.

Their father goes out to look for him, and no one’s sure what happens before he brings Samael home, not even Samael, in the end. What they do know is that when he is back, Samael isn’t the favorite anymore.

_He falls from grace, and he is thrown into the underworld, thrown into Hell._

The basement is only barely furnished, mostly a storage space, and the light is broken.

Mr. St. John locks Samael in there and says he’ll figure out what to do with him.

_Samael is trapped. He wants out, but he can’t leave. He’ll never be able to leave. He is starting to understand that his Father is trying to punish him._

_His Father is succeeding._

_Samael can’t let Him do that._

Samael stays in the basement. Mrs. St. John tells her husband that they should let him out, protests when he refuses, gets angry, but doesn’t let him out herself. Their children don’t quite understand what’s even going on, except for Amenadiel, who knows that something’s wrong.

He doesn’t say anything.

_In the dark, Samael begins to change. He’s been sent to Hell, and now he is beginning to understand why._

_He is the Devil._

In the darkness, Samael unravels.

_Amenadiel comes down to him. He is Father’s best soldier, and so he is tasked with guarding Samael. Lucifer._

Amenadiel’s father tells him to bring Samael food. Check on him. Don’t speak to him. Amenadiel always speaks to him. He goes downstairs even when he’s not told to. He wishes he could free Samael from the basement, but he knows he’s not supposed to, and it is for the best.

If it isn’t for the best, it means that father just locked Samael up on a whim, and he wouldn’t do that.

He wouldn’t do that.

_Samael learns to light his new world. He starts fires, he remembers the stars he used to put in the sky and it all comes together. He will bring light to this place exactly like his Father does not want him to._

Amenadiel gives Samael a heavy duty flashlight because he can’t help but remember the little boy who cried when he was in the dark, the little boy who curled up next to Amenadiel and made him sing him to sleep even though Amenadiel is certainly not the singer between them. When Amenadiel gives Samael the flashlight, Samael just stares at him like he doesn’t understand.

His empty gaze is one of the most frightening things that Amenadiel has ever seen, and he’s afraid that there is something terribly, terribly wrong, that something evil was lurking in the basement. When Samael turns the flashlight on, the spark of wonder in his eyes, the one Amenadiel hasn’t seen in so long, scares him just as much as the emptiness.

_“Samael—”_

_He snarls. “Don’t call me that, brother. You have no right.”_

_“What?”_

_“You banished me down here, just as Father did, but I suppose not even He expected this, did he? What an absolute idiot. Wasn’t it in a book?”_

_“What are you talking about?”_

_“I am not Samael,” he says, shrugging, playing with the light at the tips of his fingers, letting it flicker and go out and then reigniting it at will._

Samael looks right at Amenadiel and smiles a wicked smile as he plays with a lighter, flicking it on and off. Amenadiel has no idea where he got it.

“My name is Lucifer,” he says, and Amenadiel’s blood runs cold. This isn’t his little brother.

Is it?

_Father learns of Lucifer’s transformation. As Lucifer expected, He doesn’t like it._

_His Father tries to fix him, but Lucifer is exactly who he’s supposed to be._

_Lucifer is the first person to be tortured in Hell, but it just makes him more powerful._

Amenadiel regrets what he did, what he told Father in his fear, what he believed.

He’ll never forget the way that Samael cried out for him, how easy it was then to recognize the mistake he’d made in believing that Samael and Lucifer were not one and the same.

He’ll never forget how he still allowed the consequences of his own failure to understand to play out.

After the exorcism, whatever was left of Samael died, and there was just Lucifer. Amenadiel’s little brother, the Devil.

_Lucifer is still able to escape sometimes, to watch the outside world, to learn. He sees television and movies through his own power. Sometimes he even goes and takes a break from Hell. Amenadiel follows._

_Father’s little soldier._

Lucifer is allowed a television. Amenadiel thinks it’s because father and mother might feel guilty that at this point Lucifer won’t even leave the basement when he’s allowed, except for when he sneaks out.

He always comes back, though. He says it’s because Hell isn’t quite ready for him to take his leave yet. Amenadiel assumes it’s because he’s too afraid.

_Father sees everything, and He sees Lucifer, and so there’s no way for Lucifer to truly escape Hell, but he’s still waiting for one. He’ll find one someday. Father knows everything, but He doesn’t know best._

Father tracks Lucifer with an anklet, the kind that people get when they’re on house arrest, once he starts letting him out again, though Lucifer always returns to the basement.

Amenadiel doesn’t have an anklet. His parents don’t think there’s any chance that he’ll actually try to run away.

After all—look what happened to Lucifer.

_God sends people to Lucifer. Souls for him to punish. Being a big picture kind of guy, Lucifer creates Hell. He devises tortures. He delegates to the demons he can feel in the dark all around him._

_He makes the world around him into what Hell should be, because he can. He has heard of Hell before, of the idea, so he invents the real one._

That part Lucifer just makes up.

_Eons pass._

Years pass.

_They leave the Silver City._

They get out.

It’s a long story.

They don’t really want to talk about it.

_They make a life in the human world._

Lucifer and Amenadiel change their names and detach from their parents, though they never quite escape them. The St. Johns will probably never see justice.

Lucifer is happier now. Amenadiel is just tired, but they’re making it work. He’s making it work.

_They survive._

They survive.


	2. Amenadiel and Chloe

Chloe wonders about Lucifer. It’s hard to not wonder about Lucifer, and after the debacle with Malcolm, she finally confronts the one person who might actually have an answer for her about Lucifer’s whole…thing. Amenadiel. Standing in the middle of Lux, he goes on about blood packets and bulletproof vests and neurolinguistic programming. About difficult childhoods and delusions. He has an answer to every question she asks, and every answer is ridiculous.

After a while, though, he seems to start to find Chloe’s questions ridiculous too, and when he sighs heavily and rolls his eyes, his shoulders slumping, Chloe thinks, for the first time, that he’s not lying. Maybe he’s not telling the whole truth, but he’s not lying.

Maybe Chloe just doesn’t want it to be true. Maybe somehow it’s easier to swallow that her partner’s some kind of supernatural being rather than just a really…damaged person.

“Look, Chloe,” Amenadiel says, digging into his pocket and taking out his wallet, apparently losing his patience, “I have proof. I guess it’s not concrete, but it’s all I’ve got right now, and I can get you more later if you really need proof that my little brother isn’t actually the Devil.” Chloe almost winces at the edge of annoyance in his voice, but keeps her expression calm as Amenadiel digs into his wallet, muttering something about wanting to be careful, and takes out a creased piece of paper. He unfolds it and looks down at it with a shaky sigh as his face softens into nostalgia. “Here,” he says, offering Chloe a photograph.

She takes it. It feels like precious evidence, like it could crack a case she’s been working on for years. Even if she won’t like the answer, she’s a detective through and through, and she wants to know.

It’s an old photo, and Chloe stares down at it and feels a lump rise in her throat, though she’s not totally sure why. It’s just a photo, worn at the edges and a little washed out. It pictures two boys, and when Chloe sees their faces she feels like she’s been hit by déja vu.

There’s a tall black boy with a bright, beautiful smile, a shadow of exhaustion in his eyes, and dark, kinky cropped hair. He’s maybe thirteen, and on his shoulders sits a much littler boy. He’s white and has wild black curls. He’s beaming, and his dark eyes are sharp and Chloe knows him. Knows them. She looks up at Amenadiel and then back down at the photograph.

She recognizes those smiles, even though there’s no edge to Lucifer’s smile in the photo, no viciousness, no sign of the mania that she sees in his eyes now, the agitation. Amenadiel is holding on tight to his legs, and Lucifer has his arms thrown out like he’s going in for an embrace, or like he’s ready to take flight.

If Lucifer were to be believed, he was never a child at all.

Chloe looks up at Amenadiel, who frowns. He looks like a little sad and a little concerned, maybe because Chloe’s tearing up for no reason. She swallows, clears her throat. “When...?” she asks.

“Turn it over,” Amenadiel says, and Chloe does.

On the back of the photo, in cursive, is written, Amenadiel + Sammie, 1987.

Under ‘Sammie’, which is written in faded red pen, someone penned in, in black, ‘(Luci)’.

“I added that last part later,” Amenadiel says softly. “But I still can’t show it to him. He doesn’t remember. Or he doesn’t want to remember. I’m not sure exactly how his whole…reality works.”

“Sammie?” Chloe asks.

“Short for Samael.”

“Samael,” Chloe echoes. “That’s his real name?”

“No,” Amenadiel says shortly, taking the photo from Chloe. His movements are gentle when he folds it away. “No, his real name’s Lucifer. He hasn’t gone by Samael in years.”

“He really thinks he’s the Devil?”

Amenadiel shrugs. “As far as I can tell, yes. The mind can do funny things.”

“And you just…haven’t told him?”

Amenadiel sighs. He looks exhausted, and Chloe can understand why he lies, why he plays along. It’s the same reason that she plays along. “I’ve never been able to bring myself to break the news to him. He’s happy. Happy enough, at least. He’s been wrapped up in this delusion for years, it’s his whole world. I can’t take away his whole world.”

Chloe gets it.


End file.
